Warren Buffett gave an hilarious performance at his annual shareholders’ meeting this weekend, musing that envy was the most useless of the seven deadly sins because it hurts you, rather than its subject, who may even feel better as a result.

Gluttony, on the other hand, had an upside, Mr Buffett told an audience of 31,000 as he munched chocolates and guzzled cola throughout a five-hour question-and-answer session in his home town of Omaha, Nebraska, on Saturday. His take on the Christian vices was classic Buffett, combining a strict moral code with his desire to enjoy the pleasures of life and wrapping a serious message in a joke.

With an estimated $62 billion (£31.4 billion) fortune, Mr Buffett, 77, recently supplanted Bill Gates, a member of his Berkshire Hathaway board who attended the meeting, as the world’s richest man.

The annual weekend of events has come to be known as the Woodstock of capitalism and is thought to be the largest financial gathering in the world, with hotel rooms booked years in advance. Mr Buffett’s annual shareholder meeting is without parallel. It attracts a range of people from successful hedge fund managers to small children, from Britain, Australia and India, to hear his opinions on derivatives and currency fluctuations.

The combination of age, wealth and success has left Mr Buffett comfortable in his skin and with little to prove.

How many heads of huge corporations would recommend shareholders to sell their stock in his company, as he seemed to do at the weekend? “If you have a small amount of money, for many there might be something better to do than buy Berkshire Hathaway. If you have plenty of time, there are more attractive things to buy in smaller investments - it is not feasible for us to do it now like we did in the past,” Mr Buffett said.

Over the past 40 years Mr Buffett has turned a failing textiles company into a $200 billion conglomerate stretching from insurance to sweets, prompting a more than 7,000-fold rise in its share price. The sheer size of Berkshire Hathaway means that he has to make huge investments if they are to have any impact on his fund’s bottom line. Mr Buffett bemoaned that it is much harder to make a good return on multibillion-dollar investments because there are fewer of them and the companies involved are much better known.

Berkshire Hathaway owns or has stakes in about 80 companies, including Coca-Cola, See’s Candy, Tesco, Johnson & Johnson and the Washington Post. He is set to add a 19 per cent stake in Wrigley’s after agreeing to help Mars to finance a takeover of the chewing gum maker last week.

“There is no question that returns for Berkshire will be lower than in the past. We operate in a universe of stocks of companies worth at least $10 billion and more often $50 billion,” Mr Buffett said.

“You can take Warren’s promise [on Berkshire’s returns] to the bank,” quipped Charlie Munger, the group’s 84-year-old vice-chairman and less famous half of the corporate world’s greatest comedy duo.

Although he has not been involved in the day-to-day running of Berkshire Hathaway for years, Mr Munger has played a considerable part in the group’s success, providing an invaluable sounding board for Mr Buffett over the past 30 years.

In a relationship honed over decades, Mr Buffett played his usual role of the sociable wife to Mr Munger’s grumpy, acerbic husband, jockeying him along and smoothing his bluntness for the guests. After giving an investor from New Jersey a lengthy response to a question about the futurepossible direction of the stock markets, Mr Buffett, oozing folksy Mid-Western charm, gave the floor to his po-faced, dead-pan deputy.

“I have nothing to add,” Mr Munger said.

“He’s been practising for weeks,” Mr Buffett joked.

A little later, after his answer about future energy sources, Mr Munger concluded that “most people don’t think like that, but I do”.

“Charlie does not find comfort in numbers,” Mr Buffett explained, to the same gales of laughter than greeted many of their exchanges.

There is an obvious chemistry between the two. At one point, Mr Buffett mused: “Charlie and I don’t even need to talk to each other. We think in the same way and have the same spheres of knowledge.”

As if to underline the point, a shareholder from Mexico City asked Mr Buffett where he stood on religion.

“I am an agnostic,” Mr Warren said. “I simply don’t know,” Mr Munger added, with precision timing.

On the surface there is something surreal about 31,000 people flying across the world to see these elderly men talking about finance. But, more than anybody else, they represent a human face of business that people can relate and aspire to. Their investment philosophy sounds so simple - invest in solid, market-leading brands that people will always want and don’t get involved in things you don’t understand, such as derivatives.

They are very funny and they have remained ordinary. Mr Buffett has lived in the same house, valued at about £350,000, since 1958 and has pledged to give away 85 per cent of his wealth over time, most of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates charitable foundation, the rest going to four family charities. He and Mr Munger take annual salaries of only $100,000 – although their holdings make them billionaires.

On the subject of pay, Mr Munger said on Saturday: “The leaders of great enterprises have a moral duty not to take the compensation they do. I don’t know how they can do it.” And Berkshire Hathaway is a company of its word, Mr Buffett said. Once it has agreed to finance a deal, it will do so “even if [Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke runs off to South America with Paris Hilton”.

Towards the end of the meeting, a 12-year-old girl asked him why, when his hero was Benjamin Graham, the investment guru who taught him at Columbia, he insisted on not paying a dividend.

“You were influenced by your hero in so many ways, so why not in this?” she asked.“I had to do something my way,” said Mr Buffett, who has not paid a dividend since the 1960s, preferring to reinvest all profits in his company.

Ins and outs of life at Berkshire

— Berkshire Hathaway's Class A shares trade at just under $135,000 each, making them the most expensive in the world

— The group introduced Class B shares, with fewer voting rights, in 1996, valued at 1/30th of the Class A, to make it more affordable to invest

— Mr Buffett has about 32 per cent of Berkshire's voting power, while Charlie Munger, the vice-chairman, has 1.4 per cent

— Berkshire's investments include stakes in Tesco, American Express, Procter & Gamble, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson

— In April, Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates to become the world's richest man, with an estimated $62billion fortune, according to Forbes magazine

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